Raffi Khatchadourian, Operation Delirium. The New Yorker, 17 December 2012. “Military doctors who helped conduct the [psychochemical] experiments [during the 1950s and ’60s] have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” Companion piece to Operation Delirium: High Anxiety: LSD in the Cold War by Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 16 December 2012. “For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation [torture] technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium”…documents the people who were involved and what they did.” Primary Sources : Operation Delirium, The New Yorker, 26 December 2012.
Operation Delirium: a secret Cold War chemical weapons testing program conducted by the US Army during the 1950s and ’60s
The Lie Factory: How politics became a business
Jill Lepore, The Lie Factory: How politics became a business. The New Yorker, 24 September 2012. “The field of political consulting was unknown before Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker founded Campaigns, Inc., in 1933.”
The Deadly Choices at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina
Sheri Fink, The Deadly Choices at Memorial. This article was a collaboration between The New York Times Magazine, 25 August 2009 and ProPublica, 27 August 2009. [This is] “the story of what happened at a New Orleans hospital cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina…. The experiences of doctors and nurses during Katrina, [Fink] recognized, were emerging at the center of a quiet national debate certain to resonate in the decades ahead: What legal and ethical standards must doctors meet in a disaster such as a pandemic flu or terrorist attack? Who should be saved first? Who decides? To understand the pressures doctors and nurses faced, readers needed to know exactly what it felt like to be trapped in a sweltering hospital in a city that had descended into chaos.” Sheri Fink was one of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winners for Investigative Reporting.
The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care
Atul Gawande. The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. The New Yorker, 1 June 2009. “[H]ealth care [in the US] is by far the most expensive in the world. In Washington, the aim of health-care reform is not just to extend medical coverage to everybody but also to bring costs under control.” This article compares the health care systems of El Paso and McAllen, Texas and explores the problem of revenue-driven medicine.
Walter Reed and Beyond: Exposé of the harsh conditions for injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
Dana Priest and Anne Hull, Walter Reed and Beyond. The Washington Post, numerous articles published between 18 February and 2 December 2007. “Walter Reed and Beyond follows the care and treatment of the men and women who came home from battle in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It examines the promises made, and the reality lived, in the aftermath of war.”
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Winner of the 2007 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.
Winner of the 2008 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting.
Behind the walls of Ward 54 at Walter Reed Hospital with Iraq war combat veterans
Mark Benjamin, Behind the walls of Ward 54. Salon, 18 February 2005. “They’re overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.”
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jeffrey Wigand takes on Big Tobacco
Marie Brenner, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Vanity Fair, May 1996. “Angrily, painfully, Jeffrey Wigand emerged from the sealed world of Big Tobacco to confront the nation’s third-largest cigarette company, Brown & Williamson. Hailed as a hero by anti-smoking forces and vilified by the tobacco industry, Wigand is [1996] at the center of an epic multi-billion-dollar struggle that reaches from Capitol Hill to the hallowed journalistic halls of CBS’s 60 Minutes.”
Human Guinea Pigs Used To Study Syphilis: Patients Died Untreated
Jean Heller, Human Guinea Pigs Used To Study Syphilis. Associated Press, 24 July 1972. “For 40 years the U.S. Health Service has conducted a study in which human guinea pigs, denied proper medical treatment, have died of syphilis and its side effects. The study was conducted to determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body.”
The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against Freedom of the Press
Mark Sullivan, The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against Freedom of the Press. Collier’s, 4 November 1905. “In the Lower House of the Massachusetts Legislature one day last March [1905] there was a debate which lasted one whole afternoon and engaged some twenty speakers, on a bill providing that every bottle of patent medicine sold in the State should bear a label stating the contents of the bottle…. The debate at times was dramatic–a member from Salem told of a young woman of his acquaintance now in an institution for inebriates as the end of an incident which began with patent medicine dosing for a harmless ill….In short, the debate was interesting and important–the two qualities which invariably ensure to any event big headlines in the daily newspapers. But that debate was not celebrated by big headlines, nor any headlines at all…. Now why? Why was this one subject tabooed?”